Questions to be answered

The perceptive measurements of the web survey together with transcriptions of
the recordings using in the web survey will enable us to answer the following
questions:

1. Are dialects changing into regiolects?

The question will be answered on the basis of the judgments we obtain in the
web survey. On the basis of these judgments, the dialects will be clustered.
Dialects are classified into different groups so that similar dialects are in
the same group. For both judgments we will determine the natural number of
groups (clusters). We will use the elbow criterion which says that the number of
clusters should be chosen so that adding another cluster does not add
significant information. If the percentage of variance explained by the clusters
is plotted against the number of clusters, the first clusters will add much
information (explain a lot of variance), but at some point the marginal gain
will drop, giving an angle in the graph (the elbow) (Aldenderfer & Blashfield,
1984). We will also consider the L method, an efficient algorithm that finds the
"knee" in a 'number of clusters vs. clustering evaluation metric' graph. The
method was introduced by Salvador & Chan (2004). In this way we test our first
hypothesis that dialect areas have been fused to larger and less sharply
distinguished areas, namely regiolects. We may also test the hypothesis whether
especially small dialect areas will fuse with larger ones.

2. Is the lexical level affected more strongly than the phonological and
phonetic levels?

All of the recordings will be transcribed and digitized. The digitized
transcriptions are the input for the computational procedures. The
transcriptions will be used to calculate distances computationally. For the
lexical level, we will use a simple binary measure – two forms are equal (0) or
different (1) – or Goebl’s weighted similarity measure, a method in which the
coincidence of rarely used forms counts more heavily than those of more
frequent ones (Goebl (1984), p. 85; for application to Dutch lexical distances
see Heeringa & Nerbonne (2006)). Lexical phonological, postlexical and purely
phonetic differences are measured using Levenshtein distance, a string edit
distance measure (for application to Dutch see Heeringa (2004) and Heeringa &
Nerbonne (2006)).

For each linguistic level the measurements will be performed on the basis of the
old male speakers and on the basis of the young female speakers separately. We
will determine first whether the number of natural groups found on the basis of
the latter measurements will be larger than the number of natural groups based
on the first measurements. Second we test on which linguistic level the
difference between the two classes is largest. In this way we test the second
hypothesis that the lexical level will be affected more strongly than the
phonological and phonetic levels.

Additionally we will compare the dialects to standard Dutch for each linguistic
level. We expect that the recordings of the young female speakers will be
closer to standard Dutch than those of the male speakers. Similar research was
carried out by Heeringa & Nerbonne (2000) and Heeringa et al. (2000), but since
we measure the degree of convergence per linguistic level, we are able to answer
the question which linguistic level shows convergence most clearly. Per level we
may test the hypothesis that the change from dialect to regiolect especially
affects areas where dialects are relatively distant from the standard language.

3. Is the perception of the speakers affected? Has the speech production of
the speakers changed more than the speaker’s perception?

These questions will be answered on the basis of the judgments which are
obtained with the web survey. When both old males and young females listen to
recordings of the same class (either old males or young females), we expect that
the young female judgments will suggest fewer groups. This confirms our third
hypothesis that the perception of the speakers has been changed from
distinguishing dialects to distinguishing regiolects. Janson (1983) writes that
'for an individual in a situation of change, perception seems to lag behind
production'. We will compare the contrasts in number and size of groups between
the old males and young females at the perceptive level with the contrast we
found at the production level, thus testing the hypothesis that perception lags
behind production in the change from dialects to regiolects.